


In the Kitchen

by StrangeBrooch



Series: The Key to Timing - Five Almosts & One Kiss [2]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Almost Kiss, M/M, Missing Scene, Serial: s040 The Enemy of the World, Serial: s041 The Web of Fear, although to be honest it's more about, but of course they can't get anywhere with it, competent people?, idk but here's one explanation, just a bit of fluff, pining idiots with bad bad timing, what do they look like?, why were they being so flirty eating sandwiches and arguing about a light?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-18 19:14:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28872144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StrangeBrooch/pseuds/StrangeBrooch
Summary: There was something strange in the air, and it wasn’t just adrenaline from nearly being flung out of the Tardis. At least, Jamie didn’t think it was.Missing Scene fic set during episode 1 of Web of Fear, featuring sandwiches and overthinking.
Relationships: Second Doctor/Jamie McCrimmon
Series: The Key to Timing - Five Almosts & One Kiss [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2076693
Comments: 5
Kudos: 11





	In the Kitchen

Jamie stepped out of the bathroom with one towel wrapped snugly around his waist and another held up over his head as he tried to coax his hair into drying the way he liked it, when he tripped over something dark, scruffy, and decidedly Doctor-shaped. Taken unawares and partially blind, he probably would’ve crashed all the way to the ground if it weren’t for the arm that had caught him across the chest. He scrambled upright and pulled the towel from his face to see the Doctor patting himself down.

“Oh there you are Jamie, do be careful where you’re going.”

“ _Me_ be careful?” he asked, indignant, still scrubbing the back of his head. He looked the Doctor over, perplexed. “Were you standing here waiting for me?”

“No, not waiting, exactly - but is it really my fault if I get curious and come looking when you disappear like that?”

“I did tell you I was going to take a shower,” Jamie protested, but the Doctor wasn’t listening.

“And where’s Victoria?”

“Well I can’t say I know for sure,” he grumbled, snapping the washcloth at the bathroom door right beside them, “since I was _in the shower_ an' all - but if I had to guess, I’d say she’s probably in her own bath. She did only say that was where she was goin' about a dozen times.” He went back to toweling off his hair, and the Doctor stared at him.

“What, still?”

“It can’t’ve been more than ten minutes ago, Doctor.”

“Well that was plenty of time for you, evidently.”

“You’re allowed to take longer than that, ye know. You might want to try it yourself some time,” Jamie teased, swiping at the Doctor’s head with the damp cloth. He had evidently followed their lead and cleaned himself up somehow, since his face and hands were no longer streaked with dust and dirt from the explosion at Salamander’s lab, but both his clothes and his hair were still as rumpled and out of sorts as they ever were, and Jamie couldn’t understand how someone who had just done some of kind of washing up could still look such a mess.

The Doctor batted his hand away. “I’m perfectly clean, thank you very much.”

“Ye need a bandage for that cut,” Jamie persisted, running his thumb over the Doctor’s cheekbone just beneath the scrape. “Ye’re not really bleedin’ anymore but don’t you always tell me it’s not clean unless ye can cover it?”

“Oh, that? It’s nothing, it’ll be healed in a bit,” the Doctor said, waving him off dismissively, but he had already begun to rummage through his pockets obediently searching for a plaster. Jamie watched as he produced a strange combination of odds and ends - stubby wee pencils, a matchbox, the end of a ball of twine, a tangle of ribbon on a safety pin that looked suspiciously like a backup bow tie, and several other objects Jamie had no hope of identifying - before his hands were full, and, shrugging, he jammed the lot of it back into his pockets. "Not that it matters much anyway, inside the Tardis is about as clean and sterile an environment as you’ll come by.”

“Aye, in the Tardis maybe, but how long before you try landing us again, eh? I think that’s why Victoria’s taking her time - she’s gotten wise to you, you know. She knows that as soon as she comes back you’ll want to go rushing off someplace new, and she agreed we needed a breather.”

“Oh, nonsense. I only wanted to ask about lunch. You must be starved by now, the pair of you.”

“Not really. She got the food machine working while we were waiting for you before.”

“Victoria did? Didn’t I ever show you how?”

“Oh, I think so, but you know I don’t like usin' it unless I have to.”

“I certainly do. That’s why _I’m_ making lunch in the kitchen, come on,” he took hold of Jamie’s arm and made to pull him down the corridor after him, but Jamie planted his feet and the Doctor was pulled back by his own momentum, bumping into him again. “Aren’t you coming?” he asked, looking nearly hurt.

“Aye, I’ll come, but do ye mind if I put some clothes on first?”

The Doctor blinked and looked him up and down, as if noticing for the first time that Jamie was wearing nothing but a bath towel. “Surely, that’s close enough to how you normally dress?” he tried to keep a deadpan but failed a little at the end, and he was already laughing when Jamie swatted him with the hand towel. “Alright, if you must. But be quick!” He had already started off down the corridor to the kitchen with that funny little excited walk of his, and Jamie shook his head after him as he crossed to the door to his bedroom. He _would_ be quick, there was a rule on board the Tardis about leaving the Doctor alone in the kitchen for too long, and he did not feel like being responsible for breaking it.

* * *

Only moments later Jamie walked into the Tardis kitchen, still knotting the scarf about his neck and turning up the cuffs of his sleeves.

He would've been even quicker, but a few days ago the Doctor had found a sporran in that old chest of his, and although Jamie agreed it might come in handy, it was a flatter, sturdier type than anything he’d worn before, and it had taken a bit of fiddling before he realized it wouldn’t attach to his belt in any kind of way that made sense. In the end he’d figured out that it needed to hang in the front off its own strap, and he’d only just found one that worked so it took him longer than he wanted to get it on right - but thankfully the Doctor didn't seem to've blown up the kitchen in his absence.

Perhaps he had remembered his companions' rules, because rather than trying to operate the stove or anything else potentially dangerous, the Doctor was bent over with his back to him and his head poking into the fridge, and Jamie couldn’t quite suppress a smile at the sight of him, though he couldn’t explain why. He knew even the Doctor wasn't _quite_ so trouble-prone that he couldn't be left alone for a few minutes, but he found himself oddly aware of wanting to be in the same room as him just now. He crossed over to the Doctor, clapping him on the back and leaning close to peer inside himself.

“So, what can ye not find today?” he asked, rolling his eyes and settling in to listen to the Doctor grumble about some jar of condiments that he seemed to believe had up and grown a pair of legs.

There was something strange in the air, and it wasn’t just adrenaline from nearly being flung out of the Tardis. At least, he didn’t think it was. Granted, the monsters and madmen they wound up fighting wherever they went didn’t usually make their way into the ship itself, but as much of a close call as it had been, Jamie couldn’t deny the fact that there had been something exhilarating about the Doctor appearing in the doorway and how calm and collected he was as he told Salamander off, even if it hadn’t worked.

But then they’d taken off without the doors shut and almost been thrown outside into the time vortex, and Jamie knew it was ridiculous to be anything other than petrified of that. Maybe he was just feeling funny because it’d been a relief to see the Doctor again, and know it was him. They had been apart more than they usually were this time, and even though those people in the future could cross the globe quick as a wink, spending days halfway across the planet from the Doctor and in the risky employ of a cold blooded murder who just happened to be his perfect duplicate had made Jamie’s head spin – so perhaps that was it?

Even when they were eventually reunited, the Doctor had played the part of Salamander so well that the only thing stopping Jamie from attacking the man was the fact that Victoria would’ve beat him to it, if the Doctor hadn’t dropped his act and fallen right out of his chair in fright the minute she raised her arm. But once he’d proven himself to them, Jamie had felt a funny sort of lightness come over him, like he might almost float away, as if all the problems in his life could be resolved the same way, the danger melting away like frost in the sun and being replaced by the smiling figure of his friend, solid and laughing and within arm’s reach right beside him.

Truth be told, Jamie had spent a probably embarrassing amount of their trek back to the Tardis thinking about that moment – it had a similar kind of strangeness about it to what he was feeling again just now. Sure, he’d been in tight spots before and been rescued – even rescued by the Doctor, on some occasions - but for some reason that sudden discovery had left him nearly giddy, and he couldn’t really make it add up to him _why_. The surprise, he supposed, that was the natural answer. The sudden shift from being surrounded by enemies to being in safe company, but did that really account for it all? In the moment he had focused on the task at hand, but he still couldn’t put his finger on exactly what he had felt when the Doctor revealed himself, and he was certain there was something more specific to it than relief.

And whatever it was, it was back here, now.

Jamie followed the Doctor around the kitchen a little unnecessarily, not really helping but shadowing him enthusiastically as if there were some point to his actions, but he had none. While the Doctor assembled his horde of sandwich fixings in one spot, Jamie leaned back against the counter next to him, his arms folded across his chest, never taking his eyes off his face even though the Doctor himself hardly glanced up from what he was doing. Leave it to him to get distracted while flying a time and space ship, but sandwiches - they called for absolute concentration.

Well, not so much concentration that he couldn’t keep up a conversation with Jamie. Nothing usually did get in the way of that, and he tended to be the cause of quite a lot of shushing for that very reason.

But right now Jamie was content just to listen to the Doctor’s steady stream of ramblings about this and that, throwing him the occasional question or agreement, just to assure him he still had his attention, even as the Doctor’s was fixed on slicing bread onto a plate.

Jamie didn’t mind watching him work – if it was at all fair to call this work – without being looked at in return. It felt oddly private, considering how close they were standing, and how easy it would be for the Doctor to look up and see him. He wasn’t particularly good at hiding his feelings from his expression, not when he wasn’t called upon to be acting for some reason, like it had been with Salamander in the beginning. He’d done well at that, he thought. Of course, it was easy to play the hero when the set up was pre-arranged, but it wasn’t as if there wasn’t any risk at all in leaping out onto Salamander’s patio, even after he’d disarmed the guard. A little bit of risk, and a lot of swaggering - he knew he had probably laid it on a little thick, but it had worked, hadn’t it? And if he’d compensated for how odd it was to be face to face with a man who looked so like the Doctor and acted so _unlike_ him by overdoing it a bit, well, at least he’d gotten the job done.

Not now though. He had none of that puffed up confidence now, and he knew he had to be staring at the Doctor with all the thoughts in his head writ large across his face, for anyone to see.

So, as much as he appreciated the Doctor not looking at him, he couldn’t return the favor. It was like he was transfixed. Like the strange feeling he had was that static electricity stuff the Doctor’d told him about, and the only thing he really remembered was that when they’d touched, Jamie could actually feel a spark pass between them.

With that thought already in his head, it was difficult not to notice that he’d quite like to touch the Doctor now, to see if he was just being silly or if there really would be a spark. Maybe not a spark exactly like with the balloon and the cloth he’d used to demonstrate, but a different kind of spark, a different kind of pent up energy Jamie felt more and more sure was passing between him and the Doctor with every moment.

And then Jamie wondered, not for the first time, that maybe it would be quite nice if the way he touched the Doctor would be to kiss him.

He wasn’t sure exactly where that thought had sprung from, but by now it was familiar enough not to startle him. Perhaps it hadn't really popped up out of nowhere as much as it was simply sitting there waiting for him to acknowledge it - he thought it fairly frequently, he supposed, but he didn’t often dwell on it.

Now, in the false privacy of the Doctor’s distraction, he did acknowledge it, and found himself considering it rather more seriously that he would’ve expected.

Could he do it? Kiss the Doctor, and get away with it as if it were no big deal? He didn’t need more than that. Not - of course - not that he _needed_ that either, but . . . well, could he?

He knew that at home that sort of thing wouldn’t fly unchecked, that another man would be fair shocked if he kissed him out of the blue, without quite a bit of lead up and careful making sure that it was an agreeable idea. But everything was so different here – the Doctor himself was so different from anybody he’d ever met, anywhere – and it wasn’t as if they didn’t see stranger things than that by half every day on their travels. And besides, the Doctor wasn’t quite a man, anyway. He certainly wasn’t human, at least. So it wasn’t _really_ the same as if he were to try kissing a man he knew at home, not at all.

But what if that made it worse? What if the problem wasn’t that they were too similar, but too different? Maybe the Doctor would react badly to the idea of kissing a human, no matter who it was. Maybe he couldn’t think of other species like that; he was smarter than Jamie and he might have reasons to not want to be with someone who wasn’t like him in that way – but now Jamie was getting ahead of himself, because just what way _did_ he even mean in the first place? He was fairly certain that all he wanted to do was kiss him, and was that really so far from anything else they’d done?

He knew the Doctor wasn’t averse to being around humans, even being very close to them physically, if the amount of contact they regularly shared was anything to go by, so maybe he wouldn’t mind a kiss, and it wasn’t as if Jamie had any other intentions – but should he? Was that wrong too? Did people just kiss and not try to _do_ anything else, even far later down the road? Could he even be completely sure he _didn’t_ want to do anything else at all, or was it just too hard to see over the hill of wondering if kissing the Doctor would be alright to even know what he’d want next? His head was starting to spin again, and Jamie remembered some of the reasons he didn’t go and poke at this particular thought in his mind every time it occurred to him.

It was usually much easier to ignore, too, but today it felt like everywhere he turned there was some new reason he couldn’t let it go, whether that was the Doctor’s cool authority as he returned to the Tardis, or the joy at finding out it was him instead of Salamander, or even his first encounter with the villain himself, when for the briefest moment he couldn’t help but feeling like it was his friend before him who looked so disarmingly neat, well-dressed, and powerful.

 _Or,_ his brain supplied, totally unasked for, when they had first seen that video of Salamander, and the Doctor had joked that he looked remarkably handsome and then asked Jamie, of all the people in the room, if he agreed _._ At the time Jamie hadn’t had enough wits about him to do anything more than laugh, but it had also given him that strange giddy feeling to be singled out like that, and was that really a question you asked a man unless you knew he’d say yes, and you wanted him to?

There had even been a number of times before now when Jamie had thought – alright, had downright hoped, if he was being honest with himself – that the Doctor really was about to kiss _him,_ but of course he’d clearly been wrong about those, so how could he know if it would be alright for him to do it now?

He thought – no, he knew it would almost certainly be _alright_ , if only because he couldn’t honestly see it mattering enough to the Doctor to truly bother him. Even if Jamie had been wrong about the other times _and_ the comment about Salamander being handsome, it was much more the Doctor’s style to brush it off as an unimportant mistake and say no more about it, but that was hardly reason enough to go ahead and try. Giving him one small kiss might not be much of a risk at all – hell, he could probably convince the Doctor it was just a display of friendly affection if he had to - but would the Doctor _like_ it? He didn’t want to do it if he wouldn’t actually enjoy it – and oh, that started to make it sound like he really did want something to come out of it after all, didn’t it?

The Doctor looked up at him and caught him in the middle of this train of thought.

“Cat got your tongue?” he asked, with a brief but devilish smile as he plated the sandwiches. And why did he have to be talking about tongues now, that didn’t help. It never turned out to be true, but sometimes Jamie felt as if the Doctor could read his mind. He knew that wasn’t the case, though, because it was only ever when the Doctor looked at him like that - his eyebrows slightly raised, holding his head at such an angle that he had to peer up at Jamie through his eyelashes - and if he was reading his mind Jamie thought he wouldn’t be pulling faces like that every time he did it, it was hardly subtle, so it had to be the face itself that made him feel so seen. Honestly, it was obscene. If he were a lassie he might’ve batted his eyelashes. What was Jamie saying? The Doctor batted his eyelashes at him all the time and yes, he did want to kiss him.

He just needed to get the Doctor to notice that so he could tell if he’d like the idea before he did anything. And if that look was anything to go by, it might not be too hard to get him to catch on.

Suddenly sure of himself, he flashed his best grin and realized too late that it was the exact same one he had used on Salamander when they’d first met. Yes, he had thought kissing the Doctor might be a nice idea in the abstract for some time already, but he didn’t think he’d ever been so certain he wanted to do it in the moment as he was right now. It was even possible he'd made up his mind before now, without realizing, and that was why the Salamander situation made him a little excitable and hot under the collar. He remembered the Doctor in that high collar and wondered if he had felt it too.

“Just watchin’ you,” he teased, doubting the Doctor would just let that go.

“Oh? See anything interesting?” he quirked an eyebrow as he offered him a sandwich and Jamie took it thinking yes, yes he could do this. He could flirt, and the Doctor would flirt back, and eventually somebody would have to kiss the other – he wasn’t even sure it would have to be him that did it anymore, but if it was he certainly had a few ideas.

It could happen right here at the counter, Jamie could slide an arm around his waist – hidden as it was somewhere under those baggy clothes of his, Jamie spent enough time holding him that he knew exactly where to find it – or maybe he should just tap him on the shoulder and catch his lips when he turned his head. He might do even better stood back against the pantry, just in case that floating feeling came back again and he couldn’t trust his legs to support him all by themselves. Should he make a bold, direct remark and then wait for the Doctor to do the rest, or would it be better if they both leaned in slowly until their eyes slid closed and focused only on the feel of one another, shutting out one sense to better enjoy another?

Jamie shifted so his elbow was resting on the cabinet directly in front of the Doctor, sliding into his field of view as smoothly as he could. He opened his mouth to speak, to make some probably very silly but not unwelcome remark about how much more interesting the Doctor was than the plate of sandwiches he was holding out between them – when something in his vision flashed, distracting him momentarily. “Only—what’s that light?”

“What light?” The Doctor asked, his brow furrowing as he glanced over his shoulder to follow Jamie’s line of sight. Just over the side of the Doctor’s head, Jamie could see out into the corridor where it opened up into the control room, and though he hadn’t been paying attention to anything but the Doctor, he had definitely seen something flash. The Doctor turned back to him, shaking his head at his own foolishness. “There’s nothing there, is there?”

“No, there it is again, I swear!” Jamie insisted, for the Doctor had turned around just when it flashed again, but at least this time he could see where exactly it had come from. “That light, halfway up the back panel on the console, it flashed.”

“That light? It can’t have, not while we’re in flight.” Taking the plate with him, the Doctor headed out of the kitchen toward the console room, with Jamie as his shadow.

Alright, so kitchen-based ideas of how and where to kiss him were out for the moment, but Jamie was undeterred. This might be a tiny interruption but if anything, he would use it as another opportunity to flirt with him, to banter and bicker and wind up well within one another’s personal space. He certainly had the Doctor’s attention now, and he didn’t see how anything could actually distract him from his goal, not now that he was determined.

“I tell you it did, it was flashing!”

“Now Jamie, if that light had come on, we’d have landed, wouldn’t we?”

“Look, I’m not arguing about that—"

**Author's Note:**

> Shockingly, this turned out longer than it was meant to be, and also took longer than it was supposed to because, y'know, life, etc, etc
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
